Monday, December 12, 2016

Spadaro Attack Machine: Critics of Amoris Laetitia are "professional Christians who put a bandaid of self-righteous over their oozing slime of sin"

Connoisseurs of the Antonio Spadaro Twitter stream know that 90% of his tweets and retweets pertain to his own interviews, articles and the like.

One might think that he's the busiest, most productive writer in the world until one realizes that those twenty diverse tweets he just shared all link to the same Martin Scorsese interview.

An additional 5% of Spadaro's tweets are pictures of what he had for dinner or snapshots looking out of airplane windows.

But occasionally - perhaps once every 24 to 48 hours - he'll retweet an article or post from someone else. These days they are invariably defenses of Amoris Laetitia and/or attacks on its critics.

A few hours ago he retweeted a bizarre rant from a former Democratic state representative from Oklahoma. Rebecca Hamilton claims not to have actually read Amoris Laetitia. She also claims that Amoris Laetitia is a "new revelation":

The latest hook to hang pope hatred on appears to be Amoris Laetitia. I was too sick to read when this was published, and, to be honest, I haven’t bothered to read it since.

Pope Francis is saying, like the first Peter, that Jesus in the Eucharist will be available to more of the people that He made, the people that He came to save.

That, my friends, is just as consistent with the Gospels as the prior way of doing things was. I believe that it is a new revelation for our times, an extension of the Covenant of grace.

Before continuing we should note that Spadaro and the rest of the Francis propaganda machine seem now to be really scraping the bottom of the barrel in their desperation, against rising opposition, to defend communion for the divorced and remarried. The contrast here is telling. On the one side we have Oxford philosopher and legal scholar, John Finnis. On the other we have Democrat pol turned minor Patheos blogger, Rebecca Hamilton.

The retired Mrs. Hamilton has a dotty New Age view of her faith - the Pope uses Apostolic letters to proclaim new revelations. She also have a few choice words for Cardinal Burke, John Finnis and the rest of us.

Does Spadaro agree with her sentiments? It's true he didn't explicitly say so. But her article did make it into his relatively small pantheon of Amoris Laetitia related retweets.

But that is part of Spadaro's schtick, isn't it? Provide cover for his attacks, perhaps with a sock-puppet, while feigning innocence as to any personal intended impropriety or rudeness. In this case he didn't use a sock-puppet, which I assume means the retweet has a high level of authority in the, so to speak, Spadaro magisterium.The following are direct quotes from Mrs. Hamilton, and refer to the critics of Amoris Laetitia. I "edited" them only by taking them out of the paragraph flow to make a list (again, you may read the actual post to check that I have been fair):

tear into the fabric of the Church with destructive glee

venomous comments

malicious misinterpretations

deliberate destructiveness

the obsessed people

internal rage

disrespect and hatred

usual projections of angry people

trying to deal with their mental health issues

vilify the pope

the internal fires of self-deification that burn inside themSchismatic individualism

destroying simple faithfulness

outrageous behavior

vilifying Pope Francis

deliberate misquotes

misquoted teachings from earlier popes

weave tangled skeins of canon law

misquoted papal statements

like a spider, spinning a web to catch its prey

rageful faithful movement

cardinals who should know better

priests who also should know better

bloggers looking for something inflammatory to say that will spin their view meters

wayward cardinals and priests

tribal adoration from the pope-haters

wave of insults and claims

The core problem here...is, a matter of sin

slander

lying

amorality

anyone who disagrees with them is subhuman trash

a bandaid of pious self-righteousness over the oozing slime of sin

satan...has...taken over our public discourse

The election just past proved that rather decisively

hatred and vilification (of) Pope Francis

utterly amoral

this plunge into the pit by a whole society

the anger of people who have been called on their sins

they have no intention of giving up (their sins)

those whose real god is their politics.These people have conflated Jesus Christ with their politics

they have fallen so deeply into the sin of this idolatry

They condemn the pope

hook to hang pope hatred on

Again, it's odd that Hamilton would accuse others of misquoting the Pope when she admits that she didn't read what the Pope actually said.

Rebecca Hamilton is a retired Democrat politician who before she was driven partly insane by the current crisis in the Church, did some good work (for example, for the pro-life movement).

Antonio Spadaro - the Pope's "mouthpiece" - is a vain and silly little man.And Amoris Laetitia is nothing more than an emanation. It cannot be defended by any honest and rational Catholic.They're not even trying anymore.

Miz Hamilton has yet a lot to learn about the faith. I visited her blog once last year and she was ranting about how the Church was shaming rape victims through St. Maria Goretti. Oh, yes, and her "colleague, Simcha Fisher" gets it. The woman has some serious problems. One wonders why she became Catholic in the first place.

Actually that was Spadaro's title. Note his "spoke" and then the "spoken" beneath it. In Spadaro's defense (!), his English is not so good and he's always making silly little mistakes like that. It's almost endearing if you can ever get past the fact that he's such an obvious jerk. :)